I’ve been wanting to create this thread for a while to discuss the simplest things that teams can do to improve their results at competition, these can be based off of personal experience with your own team, observations of other teams, things you’ve read on CD, or anything else. I’ll start with my 3 tips.
1) Make sure everyone on your team showers every night, and wears deoderant
This is probably the easiest of the three. Having a team member who smells bad reflects badly on you and makes you unpleasant to work with. Teams will be unlikely to want to work with you again 2) Make your bumpers slick, and clearly legible from the top of the stands
This makes you easier to scout and collect data on. Most alliance captains would rather pick a robot that they know is bad, than a robot that they don’t have data on. Good looking bumpers also reflect well on the quality of your robot. If a team can’t build bumpers that stay in one piece, it’s hard to trust their robot to stay in one piece. 3) Stay professional and polite at all times
This one comes from a personal experience that I had at a competition in 2015. One of our alliance partners in Quals dropped a stack during a match and, instead of adapting to the situation and dealing with it, the drive team got into a shouting match. This was an isolated incident of a robot that we had been planning to pick as our second pick, however, because of this incident, we decided to pick another team, and they didn’t get to play in elims. You never know who will be listening to the arguments between you and your teammates, so it’s best to avoid having them.
Read the rule book and know what you can do, when you can do it, and where you can go.
Be proactive about match strategy, don’t try to do it all in the queuing line. See if you can get your partners in the upcoming match to discuss strategy with you beforehand so it is not rushed and you make sure you go into each match with the best chances.
Focus on how all three robots on your alliance in qualifications can complement each other to best win the match. If this means you are not playing the role you would like to be playing every match, so be it. Wins over ego.
Be honest about your capabilities and don’t bite off more than you can chew. If a mechanism isn’t working let your partners know. Find something you are good at and can do consistently, not only will you be more attractive to those picking alliances, you may win more qualifications because of it.
If you are an alliance captain for eliminations make sure you don’t just pick teams based on recognizable names or personal preferences. Back it up with data and try to build the alliance that best suits your strategy for winning. Back in 2014 team 254 chose a team who was ranked 43/45 as their first pick for the first alliance and won their regional. (Central Valley-2014)
(emphasis mine)
++1 this. Everyone on the team, and particularly the drive team and those working in the pit, should be very familiar with rules. Robot rules, Game rules, Tournament rules. Following rules helps you win and/or be picked; penalties have the opposite effect.
My addition: be Gracious and Professional. To everyone, all the time. There are different measurements of “succeed”; GP will help with all of them.
The best thing to do is be reasonable. Know your boundaries and build to them every year trying to push the envelope. Knowing what you can and can’t do could be the difference between winning a match and not, getting picked and not. One of the things I see teams do every year is try to be something that they aren’t.
Drive practice trumps robot attachments. Consistently doing one minor thing is far better than trying and failing major things, both in seeding and being picked.
The higher seed alliances (5-8) look for inconsistent potential, lower seeds look for consistent performance.
I love these tips. Here is my take on the original 3.
1) Make sure everyone on your team showers every night, and wears deoderant
I’ve actually spoken to several safety advisors about this at competition. Hygiene at competition is a SAFETY issue and should be managed appropriately. Your local team safety captain should be the defacto leader on this.
2) Make your bumpers slick, and clearly legible from the top of the stands
It’s not THE easiest thing, but having an autonomous mode helps a lot. If you’re not confident in your bot’s defense crossing ability, don’t even bother with the “Drive like heck and hope you cross” autonomous. A simple drive forward slow and reach a defense auton is still +2 pts vs. nothing. And there are definitely matches that could be decided by that +2 pts.
Just, you know, test it first in a practice match or field. You definitely don’t want to be the robot that goes the wrong way in a quals or elim and ends up with tons of penalties.
Do your best to remain impartial to bias based on your past experiences with a team, rumors, reputation, and how high their number is. While there are a lot of teams that are powerhouses year after year, most teams go through cycles of high and low performance. Students and mentors come and go. You never know what kind of robot a team is going to field or how easy it will be to work with their drive team.
Going into a strategy meeting with preconceived notions about performance based on those factors can work against you. Don’t underestimate newer teams, and don’t overestimate the abilities of a veteran just because their number is a lot lower than yours.
“Succeed” means different things. It doesn’t just mean a blue banner.
At our last regional we witnessed an awkward moment when the students from another team were being chewed out by a mentor in their pit. There was a lot of yelling and angry words. I don’t know the context, or whether something had happened to justify it, but it reminds me that at the end of the day I would want my team members to be positive, pleasant, and well behaved at all times, no matter how well or poorly we were doing on the field.
Another tip I’ve found top be important is knowing who designed what. If a system isn’t working, make sure you talk to the person or group who designed it. Sometimes an obvious solution doesn’t work because of a hidden issue (known only to a select few people).
Tip is to never ever be rude to alliance partners. We had an alliance partner (the adult coach) say to us in queue “your scouting results look unfavorable” when I gave him a surprised look because earlier in the day i heard the exact opposite he said “I’m just being real” ironically enough in the end we were the 8th alliances first pick and the team whom found our scouting results unfavorable did not even get into elims.
That team will never be on a picklist of ours so GG.
We had a little pep talk with our drive team during one of our recent practice sessions (oh yes - add have practice sessions to the list). We talked about how teams have “do not pick” lists and that the kinds of things that get you put on that list often do not have anything to do with the performance of the actual robot. We wouldn’t ever want to land on someone else’s DNP list. Instead, we want to be the team that everyone enjoys working with - the team that is known to be friendly, communicates well, follows through with their promises, is honest about their ability or inability, doesn’t put other teams down, etc. In other words, be GP.
Sure, good teams pick on potential and great teams pick on consistency, but surprised teams pick on recognizability. So does the media. Having a colored robot, a great t-shirt design, or a cool mascot can improve your image, sure, but these things can take time, money, and/or thought. Yelling doesn’t. This strategy may not get you to finals or an award, but if you consider yourself successful if you just make elims or end up on the local news, this isn’t a bad way to go.
(This also extends to dancing.)
Drivers should be driving during build season. If not a robot, any R/C vehicles would help. Even certain video games are good practice. I like The Cheesy Poofs’ driver selection process, and they always seem to do well.
I believe one of the easiest ways to succeed at competition is to scout. Even if your team don’t have 6 scouts, a few dedicated students can take notes on the different teams they see compete. Those notes are often invaluable.
Scouting doesn’t just have to be for creating a pick list. The data collected while scouting can help teams to know what strategies can be effective in certain matches. It’s always better to go into a match strategy meeting knowing what you’re talking about, and being backed with data, than just going in blind.
Good scouting and good strategy can turn an iffy, or okay robot into a #1 seed, or even the Regional/District winner.
And of course always scout your own robot. It’s easy to get stuck in the mind frame of “this what we wanted to do,” and not, “this is what we can do.” If you scout your own team, you will get hard data that you can not argue with. You will get a sense of what your robot can actually do.
We had that happen in our match… a robot drove across the center line and drove on our robot, and basically sat on our arm. They came to us later and told us their coach said “Just use the auto, what’s the worst that could happen?” Even though the coder wasn’t confident in it yet.
